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Marjorie Agosí­n

Marjorie Agosín was born to Jewish Chilean parents and as an adolescent moved with her family to the United States to escape the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Socialist government. Among her many books of poetry are At the Threshold of Memory (White Pine, 2003), An Absence of Shadows (White Pine, 1998), and Starry Night (White Pine, 1996), winner of the Letras de Oro Prize for poetry from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Her most recent books of prose are Writing Toward Hope: The Literature of Human Rights in Latin America (Yale, 2006), Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Ciudad Juárez (White Pine, 2006), and Cartographies: Meditations on Travel (Georgia, 2004), introduced by Isabel Allende.

Author

You

Fall 2007 | Poetry

perhaps it was the way the wind brushed your cheek a warm hopeful wind or how, leaning over, you straightened my rebellious hair perhaps because we read the same poems and you recited them in my back it was easy for us to love one another that month [...]

The Mothers of Exile

Fall 2007 | Poetry

in that orphan landscape of family legends of dangerous longings in those lands of foreign languages solitary customs and houses submitted to the silence of early snowfalls the mothers in exile the widows of exile the wives who followed their husban [...]

Scent of Chile at Daybreak

Fall 2007 | Poetry

this daybreak here on a foreign shore on the other half of the world, and on another ocean I felt that the sea smelled like Chile after the ruthless rains, or the days of fog when ghosts and those blessed by miracles come out to haunt among the hill [...]

Nothing Was Known

nothing was known nothing was heard only faces nothing was known nothing was heard faces of young people faces that did not know fear or the slowness of death imposed by men nothing was known doors and schoolyards were closed silence r [...]

The Empty House

Fall 2007 | Poetry

you return to the empty house you recognize yourself diminished between its thresholds you remember that dawn and the flight the captive gaze of the neighbors in the perfidious ceremonies of an unwelcome goodbye now you return in vain, you do not su [...]